58 Festival dei Popoli – Florence October 10th – 17th, 2017

With this 58th edition, the first one to take place in the month of October, Festival dei Popoli comes back on the scene after a shorter than usual intermission. Over the past ten months, our work group paid equal attention to finding the films that make up the programme and evaluating the topical subjects that, in our opinion, deserve to be delved into and ‘framed’ through the prism of a selection that not only fulfils cinematic interest but also offers interpretational tools for those who try to make sense of the phenomena that involve the community and in which all of us, willing or not, are a tiny, but irreplaceable tile of the mosaic. Therefore, our cover proposes the graphic rendering of one of this edition’s themes, i.e. the Focus “Domino Effect – Dreams and nightmares of contemporary power.” The domino tiles toppling with nothing to stop them are an implicit reference to a balance, an invisible, but tenacious bond that holds “all the things of the world” together; and, if undermined, produces shattering effects that affect everyone, with no exceptions. A simple game becomes a metaphor, if not a warning to urge all of us to play their role conscientiously.

This edition is characterized by other important innovations too, supporting the sophisticated and surprising twenty-one films of the international Competition and the high-quality selection of the Italian Competition: in fact, Doc at Work – our laboratory of ideas that, in past editions, has given room to a coproduction market, a reflection on creative processes, seminars and workshops held by internationally renowned professionals – proves its versatility and multifaceted nature by focusing on the work done by Italian Film Schools, in the belief that their activity plays a strategic role for the entire audio-visual sector. Film Schools are like outposts that offer a vantage point on the work done by young talents as well as training grounds in which the new generations of cineastes are allowed to test themselves. Therefore, we selected the films made in 2017 by students of the Turin Scuola Holden, the Milan Civica scuola di cinema Luchino Visconti, and the Naples Centro FilmaP – Atelier di Cinema del Reale. Hopefully these works and the young film-makers will thus meet the audience, press, professionals, and all our guest.

The second, but not less significant, novelty is constituted by “Meridiano Zero”, an initiative in collaboration with AICS – the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation – in which a selection of documentaries realized in some of the countries that are priority for Italian cooperation is presented. This programme allows us to cover a sector that employs the skills of documentary film-making to tell stories of solidarity and exchange between people from different origins and cultures. On top of this, working with AICS gives us the opportunity to increase our screening venues, for the largest portion of this section will be hosted by the Agency’s headquarters in Florence, namely the suggestive auditorium of the Overseas Agronomic Institute.

The picture would not be complete without mentioning the presence of a cineaste of international renown, Kazuhiro Soda. Making a succession of films that aspire to be a single, monumental work in progress, he is composing an extraordinary social portrait of contemporary Japan that avoids well-trodden touristic paths while exploring the most authentic soul of the eastern country.